Paris agreement: international search for a climate compromise

The article analyzes the Paris Climate Agreement, which was the subject of the 21 Conference of the Parties in December 2015. This agreement completed the years of preparation and negotiations that began after the failure of COP 15 in Copenhagen in 2009. This agreement confirms a new logic based on the ability of States to make voluntary commitments and gradually correct in order to maintain the trend towards a decrease in temperature below 2C at the end of this century. However, there are many obstacles to the implementation of this agreement. Some of them are technical in nature (inertia of energy systems, duration of investment cycles), while others are demographic in nature (world population growth, growth of energy needs of the middle class). In addition, and undoubtedly more fundamentally, the main pitfalls arise from the complexity of a globalized economy in which energy prices are unstable, which makes long-term economic calculations very uncertain.